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o E. A T I o :n 



DEHVERKD BEFORE THE 



jitj ^iiH:;©il iii |itl|ei| if li|tii| 



JULY 4, 1884, 



HARVEY N. SHEPAED. 




BOSTON : 
PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL. 

MDCCCLXXXIV. 







*ROCKWELLiii 



CHURCHI LL-* 
BOSTON.' 



CITY OF BOSTON 



In Board of Aldermen, August 18, 1884. 
Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council be 
expressed to Harvey N. Shepard for the eloquent and 
interesting oration delivered by him July Fourth, the 
one hundred and eighth anniversary of American Inde- 
pendence, and that he be requested to furnish a copy 
for publication. 

Passed. Sent down for concurrence. 

C. V. WPIITTEN, Chairman. 

In Common Council, September 11, 1884. 

Concurred. 

JOHN H. LEE, President. 

Approved, September 13, 1884. 

A. P. MARTIN, Mayor. 

A true copy. Attest : 

FREDERICK E. GOODRICH, City Clerh. 



ORATION. 



The Fourth of July has been a day peeiiHar 
and sacred to the American people for more 
than a hundred years, and, at least, one hundred 
thousand orators have celebrated it, with views 
and ideas of every description, and that elo- 
quence which a great occasion always inspires 
in a sincere and patriotic soul. Therefore, when 
asked by His Honor the Mayor to take this 
part in the One Hundred and Eighth Anniversary 
of our Independence, I felt it to be useless to 
strive for new and profound notions concerning 
the causes of the Revolution, or to seek by fervid 
rhetoric to give an old subject a new brightness 
and attractiveness. May I ask, then, the favor 
of your attention to a brief consideration of the 
effect which our proclamation of the great prin- 
ciples of the Declaration of Independence had 
upon the political rights and powers of peoples 
in other lands, and indirectly upon the material 
and social condition of mankind? 



6 • ORATION. 

That immortal scroll, to the reading of which 
we have just listened, declaring "these truths to be 
self-evident: 1. That all men are created equal; 
2. That they are endowed by their Creator with 
certain inalienable rights; 3. That among these 
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," — 
possesses a vital and enduring strength which has 
wrought many and vast changes for the welfare of 
man. It is the first true assertion by a whole nation 
of the only real foundation of civil government. It 
is the first blow at governments based upon divine 
right and conquest, and it proclaims to the world 
the inalienable sovereignty of the people. A new 
society, without the traditions, the bonds, and the 
customs of the Old World, without bishops, Avithout 
nobles, and without kings, was born in a day. It is 
a new era in the histor}^ of mankind. It swept 
away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries, the 
absolute authority of monarch and priest, the hard 
rule of class and caste, and the servitude of ignorant 
and superstitious submission; and it founded a new 
nation, without I'eligious tests and without religious 
establishments, without hereditary privileges and 
without born rulers, upon the coasts of a virgin con- 
tinent, stretching from the pines of Maine, three 
thousand miles, to the golden sands of California, 
where men may plant, test, and solve all social and 



JULY 4, 18 84. ' 7 

political problems. Some would belittle the Decla- 
ration of Independence because it deals so largely 
with abstractions. Why, this is its crowning glory. 
By this it proved the rectitude of its intention and 
invited the considerate judgment of mankind. Ab- 
stractions ! — the noblest sentiments and the bravest 
convictions are abstractions. Right, truth, justice, 
liberty, and freedom, all are abstractions. The 
Divinity, which pervades the universe and controls 
sun, moon, stars, and even comets, in their stupen- 
dous revolutions, and which stirs within the soul of 
a man, is an abstraction. 'No ! no ! its glory will not 
fade, and it cannot be obscured. It has endured for 
a hundred years, and shines to-day as clearly and 
brilliantly, — a beacon to which all the people of the 
earth may turn their eyes as an abiding light and a 
saving guide. 

The influence of the Revolution spread rapidly 
the great length of the ^N^ew World, snapped asun- 
der the bonds of subjection to Europe, proclaimed 
the Monroe doctrine, and summoned into independent 
existence the republics of Spanish America. ]!^or 
does its influence fail now. The great seminal prin- 
ciples of the Declaration work alike in the indepen- 
dence of the Dominion of Canada, the saving of 
Mexico from French imperialism, the liberal Consti- 
tution of Brazil, the upheaval of Cuba, and the 



8 O H A T I O N . 

growth of the people's power on the Pacific coast 
of South America. The whole continent is the har- 
vest-ground of American ideas and of American 
pi-inciples. Our capital and our enterprise have 
built a railroad to the city of Mexico, and upon that 
lofty plateau gold and silver are mined, and cotton 
is handled, with noi'thern machinery; while I'umbling 
volcanoes and dazzling mountain-peaks are traversed 
by new settlers, and the brilliant rays of the tropical 
sun flash upon the factories and growing industries 
of our own people. The reciprocity treaty will 
sti-engthen the ties and bind us together more firmly 
by the profits and benefits of commerce and trade, 
and teach us to seek for like relations with Canada 
and Cuba, with Peru and Chili and the valley of 
La Platn, until the time shall come, in no far futui'e, 
when the same civilization, the same political privi- 
leges, and the same forms of government, through- 
out the length and breadth of Xorth and South 
America, will control three hundred millions of 
people, bounded only by the gleaming icebergs 
of the poles and the restless waves of the great 
oceans. 

The influence of the American Revolution 
crossed the Atlantic, to kindle the most intense 
enthusiasm in every part of Europe. Franklin 
was hailed by France with boundless delight. 



JULY 4, 18 8 4. 9 

The time had come when the evils of desj^ot- 
ism and the enormous wrongs of class legislation 
were seen clearly, and men would endure them no 
longer. A fierce fever stirred their blood, and it 
was quickened into fury by innumerable pamphlets, 
which were hawked about the streets, and by the 
ominous words of impassioned orators, addressed to 
groups of starving men. Paris burst into uncon- 
trollable excitement: the shop doors were bolted 
and the shutters barred ; forty thousand men sprang 
to arms in a day; the Bastile was stormed, and 
the grim fortress of tyranny fell in the dust, as the 
walls of Jericho before the trumpets of Israel. 
The States-General, in angry haste, abolished the 
separate orders of noble and clergy; and, during 
the passing hours of a single night, struck to the 
ground the whole fabric of feudal privileges. When 
we recall the savage cruelties inflicted upon the 
people through centuries of evil power, — the flesh 
torn from their limbs by heated irons, and the 
wounds filled with molten lead; their limbs broken 
with iron bars and the mangled remains exposed to 
the heat of the sun and the sting of venomous 
insects; when we recall the arrogance of the nobles, 
and their wanton disregard of the lives and posses- 
sions of the poor; and when we remember that the 
men and women of France were familiar with these 



10 ORATION. 

horrors from cai'liest childhood; — we cease to won- 
der that, hi their uprising to avenge the wrongs 
which had made bitter their hves, tliey, too, were 
guilty of savage atrocities; that they paraded heads 
on pikes, plucked quivering hearts from the breasts 
of hving men, made bitter their wine by human 
flesh, and sent a million men, women, and children, 
to the keen axe of the scaffold, until the nation grew 
weary of the hori-id work, — the bronzed grenadiers, 
whose devotion the pyramids of Egypt and the deso- 
late passes of the Alps had strengthened, hailed 
j^apoleon as First Consul, and the suffrages of the 
nation invested him with the absolute powers of a 
Koman Caesar. Then it was believed that the Revo- 
lution was over. So it was said, too, when Louis 
XVIII. unfurled the white flag of the Bourbons; 
when Louis Philippe came to heal its wounds; and 
after him Louis I^apoleon, on a like errand. But 
despotism heals no wounds and solves no prob- 
lems, and the yawning gulf of 1789 would not close. 
Throughout all these years, and under all these 
changes, the immortal principles of our Declaration 
of Independence, often smitten by the sword of the 
soldier, crushed by the sceptre of an emperor, and 
trampled in the dust by the hoofs of the Cossack 
horse, rose strengthened anew from the embrace of 
mother-earth, until their accumulated vigor swept 



JULY4,18 8 4. 11 

away the last vestige of a throne, and reestablished 
the repubUc. 

In the upheaval of Europe, which characterized 
the closing years of the last century, the Italians 
hoped for the union of their race in a liberal and 
prosperous commonwealth, which should be worthy 
of the glories of their past, when the eternal city 
gave the law to the world and the free cities of 
the middle ages maintained the manufactures, the 
commerce, the literature, and the art, of Europe. 
But the Congress of Vienna restored the old 
despotisms and arrested the regeneration of Italy. 
Her patriot leaders died on the scaffold or pined 
in exile, and her people cowered under the bayonets 
of foreign armies. The secret societies, however, 
kept alive the fires of libei'ty, which burst forth in 
1848, when all Italy rushed to arms; when Mazzini 
and Garibaldi hastened home, and the eager stu^ 
dents of Pisa, the gray-haired seamen of Genoa, 
and the citizens of Rome, enlisted beneath their 
banner. Alas for their cause! The overwhelming 
armies of Austria 'swept through the valley of the 
Po, trampled out the flickering embers of resist- 
ance, and reimposed the petty despots and paltry 
domains of little dukes and dependent princes. 
Italy had measured swords with her oppressors, 
and was beaten to the ground. Yet, even then. 



12 ORATION. 

when all seemed lost, the man was come who 
wonld lead to an early and splendid triumph. 
Count Cavour did not Vive to see, in the flesh, 
the completion of his work; but who can doubt 
that, in the bright light of that June morning, 
when he lay in his palace at Turin, upon a bed of 
fever and pain, the dying statesman saw, by faith, 
the brilliant dawn of the day, upon which we 
have been permitted to look, when Italy stood 
before the world a free and united peoj^le? 

Time fails me to pass in review the experiences 
of other lands, which, in the last century have 
been and yet are convulsed by the revolutionary 
spirit; how the heroism of the Greeks, enkindled 
by our example and sustained by our sympathy, 
wrested the glories of Olympus and the plains of 
Boeotia, the isthmus of Corinth and the hills of 
Peloponnese, the Acropolis of Athens and the 
rock-girt islands of the sea, from the Turks' op- 
pressive and degrading sway; how it roused un- 
hapi^y Poland to an unequal contest; led Prussia 
to establish representative government; and Austria 
to answer increasing agitation with annual parlia- 
ments. Western Europe, to-day, is free and self- 
governing. One hundred and eighty millions of 
people, no longer vassals, choose their own govern- 
ments and dictate their policy. In Russia alone 



JULY 4, 1884. 13 

are popular rights denied; though the open and 
frank report of the Grand Duke Yladimir and 
his colleagues upon the commission recently ap- 
pointed by the Czar to look into the causes of 
military nihilism, that favoritism and corruption 
taint the army, encourages the hope that the 
government really is contemplating some reforms, 
and, if begun with the army, we cannot doubt they 
will extend also to amend a corrupt and rapacious 
civil administration, and the day break of a peace- 
ful and orderly revolution, when Russia, too, will 
take a part in that mighty progress of the people, 
which the Declaration of our Independence began. 
To these United States, and especially to this 
grand old Commonwealth, ~ is the world indebted 
for the first establishment of common schools, 
and the instruction of all children at public ex- 
pense. It is hard to realize now how large a por- 
tion of the people, even in civilized countries, con- 
tinued in the grossest ignorance before our brilliant 
exaniple • compelled the attention of other powers. 
At the beginning of this century forty per cent, 
of the men, and more than one-half of the women, 
in Great Britain could not sign the marriage reg- 
ister. There were only 3,363 schools, public and 
private, in all England. The first parliamentary 
grant for common schools was but £30,000, and 



14 ORATION. 

even this modest sum was given by a close vote 
of 275 to 273. Xow Great Britain expends upon 
primary schools alone more than $30,000,000 a 
year, and compels the attendance of every child in 
the kingdom. In France thirt}^ per cent, of the 
people are unable to read or write, though the 
republic spends oO,000,000 francs annually upon 
public instruction, and has begun in good earnest 
to educate all the children. In Italy one half of 
the young men who come up for military service 
cannot read and write. The evil, however, daily 
grows less, and both government and people real- 
ize that free institutions need for stability and 
success the general education of the masses. In 
Germany one person in every six attends the 
elementary schools, and the principle of compul- 
soiy education is universal. Even in Russia and 
Japan the voice of the Yankee school-master is 
heard. The children of the peasant on the vast 
steppes of the Czar learn to read and to write, 
and the hoary empire of Japan wakes from the 
sleep of centuries to establish the common-school 
system of Xew England. 

At the date of the Revolution the lot of the 
people, in all countries except our own, was severe 
and hard, far more so than we can i-eadily com- 
prehend. The French farmer, in beggarly aj)- 



J U L Y 4 , 1 8 8 4 . 15 

parel, worked his farm with a wooden plough, 
and lived in a mean house, wretchedly furnished, 
his children and his cattle the shades of famine. 
The tax-gatherer took five-eighths of the produce 
of his farm; wild boars and herds of deer, the 
king's sjiort, trampled down his corn, and the 
game laws forbade him to hoe and to weed lest 
he should disturb the young partridges. He 
pressed his grapes in the lord's press, he ground 
his corn in the lord's mill, and baked his bread 
in the lord's oven. 

The condition in Great Britain was nearly as 
bad. The people and the government were at 
cross-purposes; the government seeing only danger 
and sedition in the agitation for popular rights, 
and the people looking upon the government as a 
power high above them, and regardless of their in- 
terests. The poor were wretchedly and absolutely 
poor, so that, to eke out the scanty earnings of the 
men, their vives, in the colliery districts, crawled, 
like dogs, upon their hands and feet, dragging, by 
a chain fastened to the waist, little wagons of coals 
from deep pits; and in the manufacturing districts 
little boys and girls, six to eight years of age, 
stunted, pallid, and starved, worked thirteen to 
fifteen hours a day in the factories. 'No combination 
could give the workingman shorter hours and 



16 ORATION. 

higher wages, as the statutes made it a conspiracy. 
The statutes also prohibited the importation of 
cattle, living- or dead, on any terms; restricted the 
importation of grain; taxed the windows of his 
house; and taxed his mug of beer so heavily as to 
drive him to deadly stimulants. The statutes 
hanged him if he cut down a young tree, or shot 
at a rabbit, or wrote a threatening letter. Little 
communities lived apart by themselves, following 
their own customs, cherishing their own preju- 
dices, and treating every stranger as an enemy. 
With the Reform Bill of 1832 began a great 
change, followed by the expansion of the franchise 
and the adoption of the secret ballot. The in- 
fluence of American ideas upon political forms 
in the United Kingdom shows notably in the 
use of the caucus among the liberals; and, lately, 
in a very able and scholarly address by Lord 
Rosebery, in the House of Lords, upon the 
modification of that august and venerable body, 
so as to introduce more practical and intellectual 
ability, and make it an influential branch of Par- 
liament, and wherein, after a careful consideration 
of many legislatures, he awards the palm to the 
American Senate as best representing the intelli- 
gent conservatism of a great people. The ten- 
dency of the times is toward some change in 



JULY4,1884. 17 

this direction which will put representative men 
in place of, or along-side, hereditary peers. Once 
a few great ftimilies controlled the destinies of 
the nation. JSTow the common people are in pos- 
session, and the transfer of power is complete. 
Wars no longer can take their earnings and their 
lives without their consent, nor taxes their property, 
nor unjust laws their persons ; and I doubt not that 
in their hands, by the authority of the ballot, and the 
authority of the ballot only, the land question of 
Great Britain and the just complaints of Ireland 
will find a fair, right, and true solution. 

With the establishment of free institutions and 
popular government in America, and their subse- 
quent adoption in Europe, came a vast and unparal- 
leled improvement in the material and social condi- 
tion of the people. Men, called to play a part in 
public affairs, and to discuss and decide public ques- 
tions, were quickened in thought and mind, in sym- 
pathy and feeling, in invention and discovery. The 
progress of the century in all avenues is brilliant 
beyond comparison. A hundred years ago the 
human hand did all the work which was done, and 
did it badly, ^ow the planing-machine and the 
steam-hammer, our servants, work with a swiftness 
and precision infinitely superior to human work. 
The distafi" and the spindle, the same rude contriv- 



18 ORATION. 

aiices which spun the yarn to make the pnrple hnen 
of Solomon and the flaunting scarfs of Homeric 
heroes, gave way, only in the closing quarter of the 
last century, to the spinning-wheel, as it in turn has 
given wa}^ to the spinning-frame driven by steam or 
water. Eli Whitney, a ^ew England mechanic, 
and Sir Richard Arkwright, raised the cotton in- 
dustry to a sudden and marvellous greatness. The 
American sewing-machine, with a capacity of three 
thousand stitches a minute, has taken the place of 
the needle, with modei'ate hours and reasonable 
wages in place of the night-watches and a miserable 
pittance. The farmer used to scratch the ground 
with a plough such as was used in Yii'gil's time, and 
went forth to sow equipped as were the Jews in 
Palestine nineteen centuries ago, and cut the ri- 
pened grain with the ancient reaping-hook. Now, 
Yankee ploughs let the spring rains and the sum- 
mer sun deep into the soil; sowing, reaping, and 
threshing may be done by steam; and on the same 
land crops have increased by forty-five per cent., 
and cattle and sheep have doubled in weight. 

It was in 1807 that a steamer, devised by Fulton, 
passed up the Hudson river from 'New York to 
Albany. In 1838 the first steamship crossed the 
Atlantic, and then came the final triumph of George 
Stephenson to propel carriages by steam upon 



JULY 4, 1884. 19 

land. Commercial intercom-se was emancipated 
from restraint, and, as men began to travel, 
hostile pecnliarities and false prejudices began to 
disappear. Better and cheaper post facilities fol- 
lowed, so that now two cents will carry a letter 
to every part of the United States and of Canada, 
five cents to every part of Europe, to Egypt, 
India, China, Japan, and the great island of Aus- 
tralia, and an international postal card will make 
the circuit of the globe. The lightning flashes 
messages beneath the ocean and across continents, 
and by the telephone men unseen can converse as 
if in each other's presence. Men are interested in 
all the concei*ns of the world, and its daily history 
is given to us at our breakfost-tables. The Lon- 
don Times gave only one-third of a column to 
the description of the battle of Waterloo, whereas 
to-day the best talent and scholarship, the ablest 
management, and the most daring enterprise, are 
enlisted to meet our ci'aving for news. The daily 
newspaper justifies the old saying that "the pen 
is mightier than the sword." The Czar of Russia, 
the Parliament of England, and the armies of Ger- 
many are but as fleeting shadows before the might 
of public opinion, expressed and quickened by the 
newspapers, as they fall in myriad numbei's into 
the thoughts and feelings of men. 



20 ORATION. 

Fifty years ago the iDrush of the painter preserved 
the appearance of a few distinguished persons. To- 
day the sun prints a perfect likeness of our faces, 
homes, and dress ; and it is not too much to expect 
that in the future not only men may look upon the 
faces of their ancestors, but also listen to their 
voices, stored up for an indefinite period, and 
given off at the pleasure of the operator. Man 
knows far more of his own body, the purposes 
of its organs, the remedies for their pains, and 
how to prolong his life. Intermittent fevers no 
more slay their tens of thousands, and small-pox 
is nearly abolished by vaccination. The use of 
chloroform saves us from the anguish of surgi- 
cal operations, and amputation itself is no longer 
so largely practised. Contorted limbs are made 
straight, the blind are made to see, the dumb to 
speak, and the deaf to hear. iSTowhere has the 
empire of man more notably widened than in the 
increased knowledge of himself. 

This enlarged command over the secrets of nature 
and the necessaries of life not only has given in- 
creased comfort to the masses of the people, but 
an improved social condition as well. Men work 
fewer hours, and for higher wages; women need 
not and cannot toil in mines and collieries, and the 
children are educated at the public expense. Great 



JULY 4, 1884. 21 

charities relieve the suffering, raise the ftillen, nurse 
the sick, rescue little children from disease and 
vice and cruelty, find work for discharged 
criminals, and lead repentant drunkards back to 
sobriety. The Christian missions are the work 
of this century. Heretofore they were deemed 
visionary and useless. To-day the teachers of 
the gospel are heard in every land, — among the 
mountains of the Himalayas; along the western 
shores of Africa; amid the toiling millions of 
China; among the snows of Greenland; and under 
the fierce heat of the tropics, — everywhere gener- 
ously and nobly engaged in the gigantic work 
of driving out heathenism and replacing it by 
Christianity. 

The Delaration of Independence is also the procla- 
mation of liberty to captive slaves over the world. 
In the original draft it charged upon the King of 
Great Britain* as the greatest grievance that he 
" waged cruel war against human nature itself, 
violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in 
the persons of a distant people who never offended 
him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in 
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death on 
their transportation thither." In 1794 we set the 
example of abolishing the slave-trade, which was 
followed in England a dozen years later, and in 1833 



22 ORATION. 

by the abolition of slavery itself throughout the 
colonies. It inspired also the noblest and the most 
beneficent act ever taken by the will of one man, the 
emancipation of forty-three million serfs by the aut(j- 
crat of all the Russias. The great law proclaimed at 
the beginning of our history has been fully carried out 
at last in our own country. To-day no man stands 
beneath the stars and stripes who is n6t his own 
master, and who in the eye of the law is not an equal 
of every other man. In the light of the greater 
events, which have changed the face of civihzation, 
and which sprang from those memorable w^ords, 
the noblest in the whole Declaration, and unfor- 
tunately dropped irom the final draft, we revere the 
memory of Thomas Jefferson, their world-wide 
famous author, as the apostle of liberty, and among 
the greatest benefactors of mankind. 

After this rapid review of the great results inspired 
by our proclamation of freedom in 1776, the fall of 
despotism and the establishment of liberty in the 
most influential nations of the world, the inquiry 
naturally presents itself, What is left for us to do? 
Much, very much. The issues of history for a 
century past have been political mainly. Inspired 
by our example the peoples of the civihzed world 
have taken the control of the governments into their 
own hands. Many abuses yet remain and many 



J U L Y 4 , 1 8 8 4 . 23 

wrongs still go unredressed; bat the mighty forces 
which were set in motion one hundred and eight 
years ago by oui- Declaration of Independence will, 
sooner or later, in Heaven's own time, overthrow 
every political ban-ier in the path of hnman progress. 
The questions of the next half-century at least will be 
social: the relations of labor and capital, corpora- 
tions and the limitations of corporate powers and 
wealth; the wages, hours of labor, and homes of those 
who toil with their hands; cooperation; the appro- 
priation of land; and, not by any means the least, 
taxation and revenue. 

A great change has taken place from the simple 
conditions of our early days, — a change marvellous 
and magnificent in most aspects, uncertain and dis- 
quieting in others. Then there were no enormous 
fortunes and no extreme poverty; no immense and 
populous cities, but scattered communities struggling 
for modest prosperity ; no vast corporations lining 
the banks of our rivers with factories, pouring forth 
from our mines rivers of gold and silver and copper 
and iron and coal, controlling the means of trans- 
portaticm and fixing its price, and by combination 
regulating and restricting production and the sale 
of products ; and no palace of the overgrown million- 
naire by the side of the hopeless poor struggling for 
the merest subsistence. Then as-riculture and trade 



24 ORATION. 

were the pursuits of the colonies, and hfe was simple 
with men nearly equal as to property and comfort, 
and class distinctions angered no man. ^ow immense 
fortunes are no longer rare, and desperate poverty 
is only too common. A fierce hunt after wealth 
enters every pursuit of life, and threatens to unsettle 
the integrity of the government as well as of society. 
While very many rich men, and especially in this 
vicinity, by their magnificent donations to our col- 
leges, our museums, and our charities, are worthy 
the fairest wreath, in that they leave men better and 
happier than they found them; there are others, 
and it is a growing class, who use their superior 
advantages with merciless selfishness to plunder their 
unfortunate victims, and by vulgar display and un- 
scrupulous profligacy endanger morals and invite the 
wretched to strip them of their riches. On tlie one 
hand are colossal combinations of capital and tre- 
mendous railroad and telegraph corporations, and on 
the other hand are trades-unions, with concerted 
strikes, and anti-monopoly movements, with a 
strength growing daily from a spreading dis- 
content and distemper. 

The relations between man and man are no longer 
simple, but complex; with new antagonisms, pre- 
senting problems which seem to defy the maxims 
of political economy, which cannot be solved by 



JULY4,1884. 25 

mischievoQS demagogism, nor by selfish resistance 
to all redress, and which are not only troublesome, 
and even dangerous already, but threatening to 
become a terrible foe as we approach the day 
when all our virgin soil shall have passed into 
private ownership, and the poor be confronted with 
the same difficulties which block their development 
in older countries. The day may be far remote; 
and yet our methods of production, our accumula- 
tions of wealth, our increasing poj^ulation, rapidly 
making the wilderness no longer a wilderness, and 
already crowded and cramped in some States, and 
our growing inequalities, — all move in this di- 
rection, as was foretold, prophetically, by Alexander 
Hamilton, a century ago. Already there have been 
the riots of Illinois and Pittsburg, and the sand- 
lots' control of San Francisco. Already men com- 
plain that the rich grow richer day by day and the 
poor poorer. John Stuart Mill says: "Hitherto it 
is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet 
made have lightened the day's toil of any human 
being." We may not agree to this. The facts we 
have heretofore considered, in my opinion, disprove 
it. Yet, were it possible for us to go back one hun- 
dred years, and theii look forward to the inven- 
tions and discoveries of the century, we should 
expect, with confidence, a far higher condition of 



26 ORATION. 

the masses than Ave find at present. When immense 
engines do more work than all the men then on 
earth could have wrought; when a machine turns 
out shoes by the case, and cotton is made into cloth 
faster than a hundred strong men could have made 
it then; and when a vast farm of many thousand 
square miles is cultivated as easily as were a few 
acres then; we should expect that not even the 
very poorest would suffer for the necessities, at least, 
of life. Can we go, however, even on this bright 
holiday, two thousand feet from this building, and 
not find any who are in want of shoes and bread? 
Is it not true that the larger and richer the city, 
there, also, is the most abject jDoverty? In London, 
Prof. Huxley says, there are people more wretched 
and degraded than he ever met in his travels among 
barbarians, or found in his studies of savage life. 
In London, with accumulated wealth to buy an 
empire, little children beg, steal, starve, and die, 
within sight of the dome of St. Paul's and the vaults 
of the Bank of England. 



"Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers! 

Ere the sorrow comes with years? 
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, 

And that cannot stop their tears. 
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, 

The young birds are chirping in the nest, 
The young fawns are playing with the shadows. 

The young flowers are blowing toward the west; 



JULY 4, 1884. 27 

But the young, young children, O my brothers! 

They are weeping bitterly : 
They are weeping in the playtime of the others, 

In the country of the free." 



These things ought not to be in this nineteenth 
centiiiy, and in a Democracy they are of far more 
than ordinary significance. Unless some solution 
of the problem be found, and some remedy for 
the disease, no man can set bounds to the upheaval 
and change they will make. There is no relief in 
the specious schemes of the demagogue. Such a 
man, who would stimulate class-hatred, and, to 
catch votes, advocate theories which he does not 
believe, is the accursed enemy of mankind. The 
delusive phantoms of French and German com- 
munism are like the false lights which flit across 
the swamp or the mirage of the desert or dreams 
of babbling brooks to the shipwrecked sailor, and 
they leave their poor victims more wretched than 
before. ^N^either does the brilliant theory of Henry 
George, to abolish private property in land, find 
favor in this country, where the number of owners 
is so large. ISTor do the red flag and the dynamite 
of the nihilist frighten us, nor make us think that 
the millennium will come if we will burn all the 
factories, blow up all the public buildings, and 
abolish marriage, religion, and the wliole existing 



28 ORATION. 

order of things. Whether cooperation is the pana- 
cea for social troubles and inadequate wages re- 
mains to be seen. In England and France it has 
made marvellous progress, and, when we remem- 
ber that this work has been accomplished against 
enormous prejudice, there is good reason to believe 
that it will, in time, provide a way for a 
better and more equal distribution of risks and 
profits between capital and labor. We must recog- 
nize that labor has its rights and just demands; 
that it is not a mere machine, but flesh and blood, 
and that it is not to be held on the same terms 
as the turn of a shaft or the sti-oke of a hammer. 
When the Austrian war broke out, a manufacturer 
of cement, named Quitolf, at Stettin, became em- 
barrassed, and would have fiiiled, had not his 
five hundred workmen come forward to accept a 
reduction of one-third in their wages, and to loan 
him their accumulated savings, as a bridge to 
better times. Had you visited his factories, you 
would have found reading-rooms, libraries, a social 
hall, and profit sharing between employer and 
employes, and in these things you would have 
discovered the reason of their generous devotion. 
Paternal legislation, such as the schemes of Prince 
Bismarck in Germany and his conception of the 
State as a universal workshop, is degrading and 



JULY 4, 1884. 29 

dangerous. Progress comes by the repeal of laws, 
and not by enacting them; and the less the govern- 
ment meddles with our affairs the more shall we 
prosper. The great reforms are, almost invariably, 
to remove some barrier which has been built in the 
path of human development by legislation. Man 
should depend upon himself, and not upon the 
statute-book, if he would be strong, indejiendent, 
and self-reliant. Let us encourage savings-banks 
and loan associations, to protect thrift, and to 
strengthen the securities against revolution by mul- 
tiplying homes, acquired and owned by their occu- 
pants. Let us controvert and stamp out the false 
notion of any antagonism between capital and labor, 
and teach that capital comes from, and is the most 
efficient assistant of, labor; if capital is idle or 
frightened, labor is without work and hungry ; that, 
in fact, capital and labor suifer or prosper together. 
Let the government be fair, just, and economical; 
the public offices open to all men without distinc- 
tion of party, as citizens of a common country ; 
the jDublic laws favoring no one individual more 
than another, fostering no monopolies, and obstruct- 
ing no branch of trade; and the public expenditures 
managed so frugally as not to lessen the present 
very narrow margin in the wages of the working- 
man above the high cost of living, and not to take 



30 ORATION. 

one dollar more from the people generally than 
the necessities of the government demand, whether 
the money be paid as a direct tax upon our house- 
hold furniture, or in the increased price of an im- 
ported coat. 

Such are some of the thoughts which come to 
mind in the consideration of this social problem, 
not as the whole solution by any means, but as 
suggestions, since the final solution must be 
left largely to the wisdom of the future. This 
is the chosen country of all the countries of 
the earth to give a true answer. Here are 
the proper conditions, — a democracy, common 
schools, a free press, and free speech; and here 
is sufficient variety of occupation and industry 
for comprehensive observation and analysis. One 
hundred and eight years ago these United States 
of America, then thirteen feeble colonies, on the 
threshold of our national history, with a courage 
and daring uni^aralleled and unprecedented, in re- 
sistance to England, the overwhelming power of 
which the Koman Empire in its strongest pride 
never equalled, and in defiance of all the precepts 
of European history, proclaimed the true princi- 
ple of political powers and privileges, — that sov- 
ereignty is inherent in the whole people, and that 
all authority is their gift for their own benefit. 



JULY 4, 18S4. 31 

and may be taken away at their own will and 
pleasure. It is not too much to ask nor to ex- 
pect that, at no distant day, these United States, 
now thirty-eight great and glorious commonwealths, 
a nation more wonderfully blessed than any other 
people in history, unhampered by ancient customs 
and traditions, and in possession of a most mag- 
nificent field of action, fresh, vigorous, and strong, 
chastened by trial and respected throughout the 
world, shall proclaim the true principle of social 
organization, the emancipation and elevation of 
labor, and the freedom of all men, who are able 
and willing to work, from pressing poverty and 
absolute want. 



" Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new : 
That which they have done but earnest of the things tliat they shall do : 

" For I dipt into the future, far as human eye can see. 
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ; 

" Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails. 
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales ; 

" Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew 
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue ; 

" Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm, 
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm; 

" Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled 
In the Parliament of man, the Fedei-ation of the world." 



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